Creativity is an essential skill for the 21st Century that is innate in all people and can be nurtured. We constantly need new and better ideas for almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives. The goal of this course is to help you recognize, develop and act upon the creativity that you already possess. We will accomplish this using three methods: b aware, b inspired, and b creative.
Upon completion of this course participants will:
Recognize the inherent creativity in yourself and others.
Identify characteristics of a creative person that relate to yourself.
Develop creative problem solving skills using the basic elements of the creative process.
Examine qualities of a creative environment in real world settings.
Evaluate an idea using the creative product criteria.

From the lesson

The Creative Product

In this module, we will be featuring the skill “Combine and Synthesize”. This skill is about making new connections with what we already know, and combining relatively unrelated ideas and concepts. For example, perhaps you're having trouble keeping up with your household chores. You understand their importance, but you can never seem to find the time to get them done. You take a few minutes to generate ideas, but they're the same old ones you've tried before. So, in order to come up with more novel ideas, you decide to combine your current challenge with your strengths. Perhaps you're an engineer, or you love to paint, or you're a motivational speaker. You combine the skills and tools that you already know with the problem at hand, and you come up with brand new ideas that play to your strengths! As you go through this module's lessons, we would like you to consider the following things: * What unrelated concepts might you combine to produce more novel solutions? * How does making connections spark your imagination? * When deliberately employing this skill, do you feel more creative? We encourage you to keep this description handy, as we will be asking you to apply this skill throughout the module.Ready? Let's get started! *Skill taken from Torrance, E.P., & Safter, H.T. (1999). Making the creative leap beyond... Hadley, MA: Creative Education Foundation Press.